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Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE [EOL] vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine N...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift Container...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2741271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nutanix Administrator at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Has provided seamless upgrade experiences and robust technical support
I have heard there are many features added in NKP that are not available in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE, such as load balancer features. The unified control plane feature is not being used in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE. We are currently using a third-party tool for load balancing, but going forward, NKP will include load balancer, ingress, and egress features, making infrastructure management much easier. There is no auto-scaling feature in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE; however, NKP offers it. In NKE, we created additional worker nodes and increased CPU and RAM capacity, but it required manual intervention. Concerning policy-driven governance in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE, we have the ability to implement RBAC at the cluster level, which helps maintain security by not granting full admin privileges to every end user, thus restricting access effectively.
NM
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
Consistent performance impresses users while technical support needs improvement
I definitely recommend Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to other organizations due to its high availability, security, ease of use, and all the built-in features it offers. We do no maintenance for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform since ROSA is fully managed, and that's why it is a bit more expensive than EKS. The fully managed service includes 24/7 support, scheduling, and upgrades; we only need to inform Red Hat support about upgrades, and they manage the process end to end. Overall, I rate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a nine; although I would say ten, I think it's important to allow room for improvement.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) are its simplicity and efficiency during the initial cluster creation phase."
"My experience with Nutanix's technical support is excellent."
"The solution is easy to manage. You can get everything in a single platform. It is also easy to work with Terraform as a code."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The platform is valuable due to its ease of use and quick deployment capabilities."
"We can do a lot of provisioning."
"Nutanix's support is really good."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It automates rolling out new features, packaging the code, conducting security scans, and deploying to OpenShift."
"OpenShift is a user-friendly container platform with a solid GUI that helps you follow what is going on and gives you an overview of all your clusters. It's more user-friendly than the Kubernetes itself. The interface helps you learn the platform and provides access to some features or specific comments."
"I think it's a pretty scalable tool...The solution's technical support has been pretty good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it has a lot to offer to developers, so they don't need to care about the infrastructure or basic setup of the containers, so you can just jump in and develop."
"On OpenShift, it's easy to scale applications. We can easily scale up or scale down."
"Autoscaling is an excellent feature that makes it very simple to scale our applications as required."
"The solution's security throughout the stack and the software supply chain is very reliable. When it was on-prem, it was by default secured by our company firewalls and security tools, and now it's in the cloud, which has its security and systems in place. This provides stability to our infrastructure."
"OpenShift integrates seamlessly with our CI/CD pipelines, offering robust automation and deployment capabilities."
 

Cons

"The product lacks some virtualization capabilities, making it an area for improvement where the solution can focus on providing users with more virtualization capabilities related to disk systems."
"I have issues with the product's interoperability."
"Areas for improvement in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) include upgrading management capabilities and enhancing the user interface for improved usability."
"There is no auto-scaling feature in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE; however, NKP offers it. In NKE, we created additional worker nodes and increased CPU and RAM capacity, but it required manual intervention."
"One major issue we faced was that appliances couldn't migrate from VMware to the tool. However, this seems to be a common problem across platforms. We've seen the same issue when migrating from VMware to RHV or other solutions. It's not specifically a Nutanix problem but rather an issue migrating appliances from one VM infrastructure to another. Some kernel-level and storage-level issues impact this process."
"I would like to have more nodes for availability and storage."
"GUI lacks sufficient information to help with understanding the installation and process."
"Nutanix has limitations compared to VMware, particularly in testing and industry tie-ups with different OEMs. Deploying virtual machines, especially for industrial automation, can be challenging due to compatibility issues."
"Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries to upgrade the second level and gets stuck, so that area should be enhanced."
"In my experience, the issues are not always simply technical. They do stem from technical challenges, but they struggle with the topic of adoption. When you encounter all of the customer pull, there are normally several tiers of your client pop that can adopt either the fundamental features or a little more advanced ones. The majority of the time, the challenge is determining how to drive adoption, how to sell the product to the customer, and how much time they can spend to really utilize those advanced features. If we get into much more detail, but this is from my perspective as the platform engineer and not the end customer, the ability of the end user to be able to debug potential issues with their application That is arguably the most important, let's say, work throughput in my area."
"The product's setup process could be easier."
"OpenShift needs to improve their container storage."
"The UI could be more user-friendly to drive tasks more effectively through the interface."
"It is difficult to deploy the OpenShift cluster in a bare-metal environment."
"Another thing that bugs me is that they removed the software in NFS storage. I don't understand why because this is a common type of storage. I am having problems with that, so I wish they would put it back."
"Metrics monitoring feature needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"I rate NKE's pricing a six out of ten."
"While deploying Kubernetes clusters on Nutanix is cost-effective, there may be additional costs for remote branch offices where Kubernetes is less common."
"The platform is averagely priced. I rate the pricing as four out of ten."
"The product's licenses are included in the software version deployed in our data center."
"The pricing and licensing are handled on an upper management level, and I'm not involved in that, but I understand the solution to be somewhat pricey."
"The product pricing is competitive and structured around vCPU subscriptions, aligning with our application requirements."
"OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly. We have done a comparison between AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) which provides fully managed services from AWS. It's built on open-source-based Kubernetes clusters and it is much cheaper compared to Red Hat, but it is a little expensive compared to ECS provided by AWS."
"OpenShift pricing varies by region. For example, a simple cluster with three nodes in DAL-10 might cost around $560 to $580 per month, subject to specific configurations like memory and CPU cores."
"We currently have an annual license renewal."
"The solution is expensive, and I rate it an eight out of ten. There is a subscription called OpenShift Plus, which offers additional features and products the vendor provides to complement the OpenShift Container Platform. These include ACM, Red Hat Quay, and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation."
"The license to use the OpenShift Container Platform is free. If you are capable with Java you can modify it."
"It largely depends on how much money they earn from the application being deployed; you don't normally deploy an app just for the purpose of having it. You must constantly look into your revenue and how much you spend every container, minute, or hour of how much it is working."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise40
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
The most valuable features of the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) are its simplicity and efficiency during the initial cluster creation phase.
What needs improvement with Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
In terms of features, I cannot comment technically, but the real value is the consolidated out-of-the-box solution that Nutanix offers. Nutanix has built great branding and a lot of credibility and...
What is your primary use case for Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
I have experience with OpenShift, Kubernetes, and Nutanix, as we are one of the largest Nutanix resellers in the Middle East. We handle Kubernetes on the cloud as well, so we manage most of the Kub...
Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenShift Container Platform?
Regarding whether Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is expensive or if the price is reasonable for my customers, to me, the services it provides should incur some costs, but based on market feed...
What needs improvement with OpenShift Container Platform?
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries...
 

Also Known As

Nutanix Karbon
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, SAIC Volkswagen
Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat, Kubernetes and others in Container Management. Updated: March 2026.
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